Surviving Edna: A reading of the ending of The Awakening

College Literature, Spring 2000 by Treu, Robert

Inferential readings also present something of a difficulty for the postmodern critic, a difficulty anticipated by Roland Barthes in his influential essay, "The Death of The Author," where he describes a literary situation in which the author is nothing more than a sort of intersection where language, with its repetitions, echoes and references, keeps gathering. It is hard to see, then, in this scheme of things, how any inferential reading can be obligatory, since there is no particular intelligence privileged in a specific enough way to command that inference. Kate Chopin seems also to have anticipated our present critical environment when she lamented that her original conception of the novel was changed by Edna's "making such a mess of things" (quoted in Toth 1990, 344). Can there be a more graceful way of asking the reader to pay attention to the novel's text, rather than guessing at the author's intentions? Contemporary theory encourages us to read the novel Chopin gave us without having to add anything to it. Much as with swimming, too much critical effort can have a negative effect, while we might do better to suspend our impatience for narrative resolution and allow Edna to float awhile, held up by the medium that sustained her thus far.

Bakhtin suggests an approach to reading narrative that frees it from narrowly ideological readings and allows previously unnoticed nuances and modulations to be heard. He "rejects dialectical forms of thinking, which always move toward a higher unity of synthesis, in favor of dialogic openendedness, the impossibility of closure" (Morris 1994, 15). In other words, dialogic narratives liberate us from the synthetic resolution prompted by the dialectic form (a style of reading which has, perhaps, prompted many readers to provide closure by imagining Edna's suicide with such certainty).

In The Awakening, Kate Chopin refuses to limit style and point of view to a single consciousness. Instead she creates what Bakhtin defined as "heteroglossia," which frequently embodies a conflict between "official" and "unofficial" languages without privileging either of them (Bakhtin 1994, 248). Most of these voices are presented in the realistic style that is present in much of the text. This is a style typical of Chopin's era, that is to say a more or less objective method of narration into which the author is allowed to intrude with ironic commentary. It is an efficient tool for examining or parodying social discourse. William Dean Howells provides an example of this technique in the last line of"Editha," when he tells us that Editha "lived again in the ideal," which is to say that she has learned nothing from her part in persuading her fiancee to go off to his death in the Spanish American war or from her confrontation with George's angry mother. Howells's example illustrates an important strategy of realism, which is to introduce the ironic voice as a way of seeing through the various idealisms that restrict individual thought. It is also a way of allowing an "unofficial" language to comment on the "official" one.